RIEHL: Charter school test scores tell real story

Is competition the key to improving our public schools? If a
business doesn't deliver on its promises, shoppers go elsewhere. If
they don't return, it closes its doors.

That's how No Child Left Behind was designed. In education's
survival of the fittest, schools with chronically low test scores
face sanctions ranging from allowing parents to take their children
elsewhere to closure.

Our 10-year obsession with test scores has resulted only in
glacial-speed improvement. All students were supposed to be at
grade-level proficiency in reading and math by 2014. At
California's annual rate of test score increases, white students
will be fully proficient by 2025, Latinos and blacks by 2030.

Competition among schools has been promoted on this newspaper's
opinion page. A recent editorial cartoon depicted an elephant named
"Vista School District," emitting a cowardly "Eeek!" as it perches
on a chair opposite a teacher pointing to the words "Charter
success" written on a Classical Academies blackboard.

If pictures are worth a thousand words, this one needed another
three hundred. Its companion editorial criticized Vista school
administrators for resisting an Escondido charter school's plan to
set up shop in their district.

The cartoon suggests charter schools are better than other
public schools. The editorial says students should be allowed to
vote with their feet to find better schools. Neither compared the
test scores held sacred as quality indicators by the California
Department of Education.

Here's what they left out.

Seventy-seven percent of the Escondido charter school's students
are white; one is an English Language Learner. In the Vista school
district, 30 percent of grade-schoolers are white, 30 percent are
English Language Learners.

Here's a small sample of the 2010 California Standards test
scores report, comparing the charter school's predominantly white
enrollment with the 5,000 white students enrolled in Vista's
elementary schools.

In eighth-grade English language arts, 76 percent of charter
school students were proficient at or above grade level, compared
to 81 percent of the comparable Vista subgroup.

National studies have shown that charter school test scores are
generally no better than those of other public schools.

California's academic performance indicator for Escondido's
Classical Academy ranks it above 80 percent of other California
schools. But it ranks above only 20 percent of schools with similar
student populations.

The Classical Academy's ability to attract students is evidently
unrelated to competitive test scores, which is the only way we
measure a school's success under No Child Left Behind.

RICHARD RIEHL is a Carlsbad resident. Contact him at
fogcutter1@yahoo.com.